John David Podesta (born January 8, 1949) is the Chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. He previously served as Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton and Counselor to President Barack Obama.

He is the former president, and now Chair and Counselor, of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., as well as a Visiting Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center. Additionally, he was a co-chairman of the Obama-Biden Transition Project.

John Podesta is the founder, former president, and now Chair and Counselor, of the Center for American Progress (CAP).

As far as the Clinton machine is concerned, an interlocking influence peddling pile up is the norm. John Podesta also happens to be the founder of the Center for American Progress – a George Soros operation and prime recruiting ground for Obama administration officials, including US Treasury operatives who decided which elite Too Big To Fail (TBTF) financial giants would be spared after the 2008 crisis. DCLeaks.com, for its part, has connected Soros Open Society foundations to global funding rackets directly leading to subversion of governments and outright regime change (obviously sparing Clinton Foundation donors.)

The Center for American Progress (CAP) and its parallel advocacy arm the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAP Action) are two key cogs in the left-wing policy and message machine. Using the institutional imprimatur of CAP’s “think tank” and CAP Action’s blog ThinkProgress, CAP’s directors and funders — who include left-wing hedge fund titan George Soros — attempt to move national policy debates ever leftward.

CAP and ThinkProgress are well-funded: CAP alone raked in $36.5 million in 2010, the latest year for which tax records are available. CAP Action, which runs ThinkProgress, brought in over $9 million to fund its operations.

That money comes from a wide array of left-leaning ideological and big corporate interests. Although CAP and CAP Action exercise their legal rights as organizations structured under Sections 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code and do not disclose their donors, some donations can be identified through other required filings with the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Labor.

CAP receives money from multibillionaire hedge fund manager George Soros through two of his nonprofit groups, the Foundation to Support Open Society and the Open Society Institute.From 2005 through 2010, the two organizations gave CAP over $5.4 million. CAP receives money from other liberal-leaning foundations, including the Tides Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the foundation of Progressive Insurance chairman Peter B. Lewis.

Some of the organizations’ donations have been highly questionable. For example, Bermuda-based Atlantic Philanthropies donated $1.5 million to the CAP Action Fund, which operates ThinkProgress in 2010. (Bermuda is a British Overseas Territory.) United States-based foundations are forbidden by tax law from donating to organizations incorporated under Section 501(c)(4)—such as CAP Action—but as POLITICO reports, no such restrictions apply to foreign grant-makers.